James Chamberlin

Well, tomorrow brings about a new year and to be honest, I feel like crap. For the past few days, I’ve felt like I’ve been struck by a cold, and this morning it finally hit. I can’t stop blowing my poor red nose!

It’s been a long time since I became sick. I just hope this is a regular cold and nothing serious.

My new Dell PC arrived this week and I set it and my new router up. I seem to have gotten things working just fine. Man, Vista is quite a change. Things are moved around… it’ll take me a while to get used to it all.

Here’s a tech question you Ogre & Railwolf. When you have keys on the keyboard depressed when you begin booting up your PC, what happens? My old dell made a hell of a screaching sound this morning and I’m wondering if it had anything to do with a pad of paper pressing down the directional arrows. I hope that’s all it is and not a sign of serious problems. I would hate to have big problems with the old unit.

Speaking of keyboards, I’m using two new ones. My old Dell is using a new Microsoft keyboard I bought on Newegg, while my new Dell is using the new Dell keyboard. Not only do I have two different keyboards, but I’m using two different mice… this is quite a balancing act – going from PC to PC. It’s strange. I’ll have to adapt to the differences in the keyboards and mice, but I seem to be doing a decent job thus far.

The new Dell LCD blows me away. It’s huge (20″) and way too bright. I wish there was as website which offered suggested settings, but I’ll have to go with the ones I made up. I’m not content with them yet. Some of the colors are still washed out.

In blog news, a new version of WordPress is out. Great, another security hole. I’ll have to jump on this problem as soon as I figure out which files need to be updated. I hate having to re-upload everything.

My site has been unavailable quite a lot lately. I’m at my wit’s end with Dreamhost. I’m relatively certain I’ll be moving my site. Railwolf, do you have any room? 😉

About a year and a half ago, I went ahead and bought a Dell. The last big manufacturer I went with was Gateway and that computer lasted a very long time compared to my first PC, a 350MHz beast from HP. 😛

The Dell that I’ve currently got is my only PC and I need another to take some of the load off of this one. I don’t want a gaming PC, but if I did, I think I’d hire Ogre to build me one. 😉 And since I don’t want a gaming PC, I felt like Dell would be a good choice, especially considering cost and reliability. I’ve been quite happy with my cheap little Dell PC. The only major problem I’ve had with it was the main cooling fan (over the processor) died. And since Dell has proprietary hardware, I couldn’t go out and get a new fan at a local electronics store. But it got fixed in a short period of time, and with just a week left on the warranty. Now that’s nice.

Well, the new PC that I ordered this morning won’t be here until after the first of the year. I should have ordered it a week ago, but live and let learn I say.

Here are some of the specs on the new PC:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
20 inch E207WFP Widescreen Digital Flat Panel
500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Windows Vista® Home Basic
16x DVD+/-RW Drive
Price: ~$710 after taxes

It’s not the best PC on the block, but it’s what I need, plenty of speed and a big hard drive. I wasn’t too thrilled with the Windows Vista, but I’m willing to give it a shot. I love Win XP on my current system.

And I’ve yet to have an SATA hard drive or an LCD monitor.

I have to admit that this thing is much better than my current system:
Celeron 2.53GHz
256MB Ram
80GB IDE Hard Drive

My only concern with the new PC has to deal with the power supply. Dell tends to use a lot of wimpy power supplies (250Watts, I think) and I would like to add another hard drive to the existing 500GB. I’m not sure if the PS will hold up, what do you think?

IGN TV‘s last publishing day of the year was yesterday, so naturally things were pretty hectic. One of the biggest jobs I have there is the daily What 2 Watch feature. It’s more or less a list of recommended shows, culled from various TV listings. It’s not too big of a job on a day-to-day basis, but this week isn’t a normal week. Since we won’t be publishing anything new until January 2nd, I had to do about two weeks worth of TV listings for this one article. Needless to say, it was a rather large job, but I got it done, along with two other feature articles.

Anyway, I know Ogre was pretty busy at the newspaper this week. He’s in a similar industry, so he knows how it all works. 😉

It’s been some time since I’ve offered any update on my progress and the reason is simple: there hasn’t been much progress. Although I’m still going on a regular basis, I don’t seem to be going as regularly as I used to and I’m not putting in the same effort. Thankfully, I haven’t lost any strength during this time. In fact, I’m slightly above where I used to be, which I find to be rather amazing. It shows me that losing muscle is more difficult than I thought.

My website has been very slow for much of today and I’m giving some thought to changing hosts when my subscription runs out. Dreamhost has a history of over-selling and I witness the problems every now and then. I understand that every webhost has it’s hiccup from now and again, but my site’s either down or slow far too often to be acceptable. I use practically no bandwidth, so it’s not a big deal. But I really don’t like changing hosts. It’s going to be a pain in the ass to transfer files and the wordpress database without running into some sort of error. I just know it.

Just one box in the mail today:

•  Hunted

I saw this a few weeks ago on cable and enjoyed it.  I remember seeing trailers for it when it was in theaters, but now I own it, and for about $4, if memory serves.

One of several recent DVD purchases I made from Buy.com. I’ve bought several things from them in the past, primarily DVDs and books. Well one of the DVDs in a recent order seemed to be out of stock (according to the order status). After a few days went by, I received an email from Buy.com stating they had to cancel that portion of the order because their supplier couldn’t provide them with the DVD anymore.

Fine, I understand. Maybe it would take longer or something and they didn’t want to leave me hanging for a few weeks or something. When I looked at the product page for the item, it was in stock. Dammit!

When I made the order, the particular DVD was on sale, for about $20 lower than it was normally. In my opinion, it looks like they must have met some sort of sale quota for the particular DVD and they weren’t willing to honor anymore sales beyond that quota. Although I got a refund for that item, I’m still pissed. If you don’t have the item, say so. When I ordered it, it was in stock according to the product page.

I’m more hesitant to buy things from Buy.com. I’ve never run into this problem with other e-tailers.

When looking at a few old posts, I noticed that the images I uploaded when I posted the article weren’t working. It looks as though I accidentally deleted those images when I upgraded the blog software. I completely forgot about those pictures. So now some posts don’t make much sense without the images.

It looks like DeepDiscount started their sale a little early. I was able to get my order in with a coupon code – DVDTALK. Use it and you’ll receive 20% off any in-stock DVD.

Have fun!

Like just about every other American male, I loved the Stooges. I don’t recall which cable channel had them on all the time about six years ago, but I watched religiously. I have refrained from buying any of the “themed” VHS or DVD sets over the years in hopes that the companies would do a proper job and release them in some sort of complete set. This hasn’t happened yet, but things are changing.

I just found out today that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released the first volume of The Three Stooges Collection. It contains all 19 shorts from the first three years of their work with Columbia Pictures. My gosh, how did I miss this news?!

Anyway, here’s a review of the DVD set, which was released on October 30th.

The shorts in this collection look outstanding; all except Whoops, I’m an Indian! look like they were derived from the original nitrate camera negative and are incredibly sharp, so much so that it’s easy to see how many of the sight gags were done (visible wires and hidden supports, etc.) Whoops is grainier but still looks fine; this was one of the harder shorts to see over the years, so maybe the negative was lost or had deteriorated. In most cases the shorts look almost new, and many begin with a few seconds of footage – National Recovery Act (NRA) logos, music preceding Columbia’s torch lady – not seen in years. Stooge fans have been asking about a few seconds of Curly footage missing from the previous DVD release of Three Little Beers, but that too has been reinstated.

Judging by their review, it seems Sony has done exactly what we fans have been looking for for many years. This set will definitely be on my wish list for DeepDiscount’s sale.